Something else Dad told me, which was sort of connected to his knuckle-dragger theory, was that if you stick your head in the mouth of a lion it’s going to get bitten off. Suddenly, Billy was all roar and claws, and before I knew it he had me up against a wall as he snarled, ‘I’m Billy and I don’t give a fuck which school you went to.’ Then he said that if I crossed him again he’d ‘kick my fucking arse back to whatever shitty school I came from’. I didn’t quite pee in my pants, but I might as well have.
As usual, I found myself spluttering a pathetic apology. I knew deep down that Billy was different from the bullies at Pimlico and that I should have kneed him hard in the groin, followed by a punch on the nose. I’d witnessed it done enough times, whereas Billy had probably only ever seen it in films or on stage at the Royal Court. My friends Simon and Jimi had spent five years trying to get me to understand that you only had to do it once, and that you had to make sure you were the one making the first move. That was all well and good for Simon and Jimi – they were built like a pair of mahogany wardrobes, and no one was going to mess with either of them. At Pimlico I feared that striking first was likely to go wrong and make me even more of a target, so I ignored their advice. Had I given Billy a good seeing-to, he would have probably cried and slunk off in his trench coat and never crossed my path again. Instead, I let him get the upper hand, which meant from now on I would be the fool who had to avoid him.
Before Billy destroyed my belief that Bedales was a thug-free zone, I’d been enjoying the school dance. However, like the end of the evening, the beginning hadn’t gone well either, but that was to do with my horror of dancing. Apart from my over-the-top attempt at Gully’s wedding, I had no dance moves that didn’t come with the risk of ruining my reputation. Paralysed by this thought, I found a dark corner well away from the dance floor but close enough to observe the many and varied styles of Bedalian dancing. To my surprise, Conrad hadn’t hesitated to get himself out there and dance with whoever. I had no idea where he’d learned his moves, but there was a definite and well-thought-out style to them. It involved moving his arms around as if he was doing kung fu while keeping the bottom half of his body completely still. At the same time his head was moving up and down like one of those nodding toy dogs in the back of a car. You couldn’t fault it: he was in his element, and the girls were lining up to dance with him.
From my dark corner I could see that no one cared if they were making fools of themselves. Eventually, a girl called Juliet lurched out of the throbbing mass, grabbed my hand and dragged me back onto the dance floor. It was no good protesting, and I realised I had to think on my feet about the style I was going to adopt. It turned out to be a combination of standing in one place, leaning forward very slightly and letting my arms swing rhythmically from side to side, along with a little head-nodding stolen from Conrad. There were no two ways about it, I was a terrible dancer, but the extraordinary thing was that no one seemed to be watching or laughing at me.
It wasn’t long before I threw myself into songs like Billy Joel’s ‘My Life’, the inevitable ‘YMCA’ and Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’. I was half-way through Kool and the Gang’s ‘Get Down On It’ when the girl I was dancing with led me off the floor and straight up to another girl, who was standing in the shadows trying to avoid catching anyone’s eye for fear of being asked to dance. This girl was pretty and sweet in an innocent way, with perfect teeth that came into their own when she smiled. Shy and rather too neatly dressed for a Bedalian, she shook my hand as my dance companion introduced us. ‘William, this is Sarah, who I know would love to dance with you.’ Her smile vanished and the look on her face turned to one of terror. I took her hand and pulled her onto the dance floor. As I resumed my new dance routine, Sarah moved her shoulders from side to side, obviously counting the seconds for the song to end and probably praying that the next number wasn’t a slow one like ‘Nights in White Satin’. When the song finally ended we thanked each other and she slipped back into her safe dark corner.
Later that evening, while I was in the communal bathroom getting ready for bed, a boy said, ‘I see you were dancing with Sarah Armstrong-Jones.’
My immediate response was, ‘Who?’
‘You know, Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, Princess Margaret’s daughter.’
I did know that Princess Margaret had two children at Bedales, but I hadn’t given it any thought and didn’t know what either of them looked like. Now, as I stood brushing my teeth in the bathroom, it started to make sense that Juliet, who I’d rather liked, had handed me off, in the middle of a dance, to someone else. She was clearly a friend of Sarah’s and must have been looking out for her and thought the best way to get her out of the shadows and onto the dance floor was to use the innocent ‘new boy’. Now, having been told who she was, it came back to me just how dreadful my dancing had been, and I wished I’d known who she was so I could have toned it down a bit.
It turned out that Princess Margaret’s son, David, had left the previous term, and while Sarah was in my year our paths hadn’t crossed until the night of the dance. I was also somewhat embarrassed about my ignorance, as Princess Margaret was someone Dad knew quite well and occasionally talked about. While he never stopped complaining about the royal family’s ‘complete irrelevance’ and their ‘responsibility for the rot in our class system’, Princess Margaret was always very nice to him, even if he claimed she was more interested in him than he was in her. He also said that she was obsessed with three things: theatre people, intellectuals and Jews – the first two she was desperate to be part of and the third she found intriguing, though Dad wasn’t entirely sure why. Dad ticked all three of these boxes, and she always sought him out at parties and occasionally invited him to dinners or other events. Mum was convinced Princess Margaret had a crush on him, and said she was even more certain after they were both invited to a party at Windsor Castle and she’d made Dad sit next to her while Mum was left chatting to some boring old man on another table. Then, after the dinner, Princess Margaret took Dad off on his own for a tour of the castle’s private rooms. She was far from Dad’s type, but flattery can go a long way with him.
My brief encounter with Billy had initially brought me down to earth with a thud; I was rattled by the unexpected realisation that physical violence might be lurking only a few rooms away while I slept, but fortunately my worries didn’t last long. When I mentioned the incident to Conrad, he laughed and pointed out that the chances of my being on the receiving end of a serious beating at Bedales were slim. He said that the worst that might happen would be a loss of face, which was a lot easier to live with. He was right, and other than this momentary blip I was starting to enjoy being at boarding school – I felt independent for the first time, and there was something rather satisfying about being cut off from everything back in London.
It was easy to make new friends, and I quickly found a group who were bright, funny and stimulating to be around, and generally came from a similar background to my own. There was Remy, whose mum, Helaine Blumenfeld, was a sculptor while his dad, Yorick, was a writer; Joshua and his younger brother Sasha were the sons of The Rocky Horror Show producer Michael White; a few others were connected to Dad’s time at the National Theatre – I shared a dorm with Dan Nichols, son of the playwright Peter Nichols, and a few years below me were Peter Hall’s son Edward and Laurence Olivier’s daughters Tamsin and Julie Kate. Others who became good friends included Malcolm, the grandson of the politician Rab Butler, and a boy called Roddy, who proved to be a brilliant and hilarious writer.
I loved the new and unfamiliar routine of boarding school, which started with breakfast at 7.30 and then onto morning lessons. After lunch we had sports or general studies, followed by tea and then evening lessons and supper. After that there was prep or a range of activities such as play rehearsals or clubs. No longer having to travel to and from school saved hours in the day and allowed me to get so much more done. There were no more late nights watching telly, which at
Bedales, oddly given its reputation for leading liberal thinkers, was rationed to shows like Top of the Pops and important events like Miss World and the Eurovision Song Contest.
When I was at Pimlico, everything seemed rushed, especially breakfast, which I’d grab before meeting up with Conrad to race across London at the mercy of the Tube or bus to get us to school on time. At Bedales all you had to do was get yourself out of bed, dressed and downstairs to the dining hall. After lessons we’d stroll back for lunch or supper. Each meal felt like a relaxed social event where we’d sit around talking and laughing with our friends. We chatted about things that happened in class or about the books we were reading; we debated politics, our fear of Ronald Reagan becoming president, nuclear disarmament and the CND movement.
The one thing I missed at Bedales was music, for the simple reason that is wasn’t worth doing. At Pimlico we’d had a chamber and a symphony orchestra, and because of its famous music course they were known for being the best school orchestras in London. They could play pretty much anything from a Beethoven symphony to Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. At Bedales the orchestra could only be described as terrible. When I’d arrived, I’d wanted to give up the oboe and take up singing, but when the head of music discovered that I was an oboist, he begged me to keep it up and join the orchestra. I was truly shocked by the first rehearsal: the orchestra met in the school hall and the head of music began conducting while remaining completely oblivious to the fact that no one was playing in tune or keeping time. After the first term I walked out, put my oboe away and joined the choir, which was only marginally better.
I’d been interested in the usual political causes when I was at Pimlico, like CND and the Anti-Nazi League, but our involvement never went further than wearing badges or drawing their logos on our school bags. There were plenty of serious campaigns to choose from at Bedales, and each came with a lot of sitting around in classrooms and common rooms, where we’d discuss the issues and then take action. Along with the ones I’d been familiar with at Pimlico there were also others to get behind, like Greenpeace, the Anti-Apartheid Movement and Friends of the Earth. Partly because of Dad’s involvement with them when he did The Secret Policeman’s Ball, I chose to throw my lot in with Amnesty International.
Once a week Remy and Joshua got a group of us together in a classroom after supper to write letters on behalf of Amnesty International. These included a regular letter to the president of South Africa asking for the release of Nelson Mandela. Then there were letters to a number of notorious dictators, which Remy suggested ways to personalise with things like ‘Dear Mr Bokassa [or Mr Mobutu or Mr Gaddafi], on a recent and most enjoyable visit to your country I became aware of the imprisonment and torture of one of your citizens and leading intellectuals. In the interests of a better world my friends and I wondered if you might consider setting him free.’ The hour and a half of letter-writing each week felt far more worthwhile than the times I’d spent writing to Biddy Baxter at the BBC asking for a Blue Peter badge, even though we never got a reply from any of our dictators. Maybe I half expected to get one that said, ‘Dear Mr Miller, sorry for the slowness in replying, but we get over 4,000 letters a week, but in the meantime, we thought you might like a photo of one of our torturers.’
The disappointment I felt about my dorm was compensated for by being assigned one of the nicest studies in the school, tucked away in a large attic room in the science block. I shared it with four other students, who all turned out to be rather too laid back about their academic commitments. This probably had something to do with the fact that our remote location was far away from the prying eyes of our teachers, which allowed us to get away with sitting around for hours drinking coffee and gossiping. Conrad was doing English, maths and physics for A-level, and his study was on the other side of the school, in the English department. It was on the ground floor, with large windows, and was next to a busy pathway. This meant people were constantly walking past and could see whatever he and his study companions were up to. As a result, his study companions were a lot more studious than mine and spent more of their time working or discussing what they’d learned in class.
Owing to a constant concern that we might burn the school down, kettles had been banned from all the studies, but this hadn’t stopped one of the boys in my study hiding one behind a panel in the eaves. I’d discovered a deli in Petersfield that sold freshly ground coffee like we had at home, and I asked Mum to send a large box of coffee filters in the post, which she did along with a very large fruit cake that she’d made. This allowed my study mates and me, along with a steady stream of visitors, to sit around on two dilapidated sofas, brewing coffee, chatting and generally not getting on with our work. One of the boys had shown us how to make elderflower champagne in old lemonade bottles, which we hid with the kettle. But he forgot to tell us about the need to release the pressure from the bottles occasionally. Needless to say, one afternoon they exploded like a 21-gun salute. Everyone in the building assumed the noise had come from an experiment in the chemistry lab, so no questions were asked, which would have led to the discovery of our contraband kettle.
Conrad outside his study at Bedales, 1981
The obligatory A-levels for medicine are the three sciences: physics, chemistry and biology. The thing about the first two, and what makes them different from, say, English or history, is that they require you to know the answer to the question, and as my teachers were always telling me, there is only one answer – and that’s the right one. To get the right answer you also need to have a pretty good grasp of maths, which quite frankly I didn’t have. Biology is subtly different; there’s no maths, but you need to understand what’s actually taking place in a plant or animal and then identify all the parts and remember their names. You have to know the facts, but in biology you can also get away with having an opinion and writing about it, which you can’t do in chemistry or physics.
The first project I did for biology A-level was anatomy and the dissection of a rat, which, thanks to all the lessons from Dad, I was able to do with precision. Anatomy was a pushover too, as I’d grown up with an enormous anatomical picture on our kitchen wall of a man’s torso showing all the organs, and many meals were spent being tested on their names and functions. The thing about dissection is there’s no right or wrong way of doing it – you’re either good or bad at it, and thankfully I was quite good. We were each given a rat, which arrived in a plastic bag and was completely rigid, with fur that had turned a fluorescent yellow from the formaldehyde. With the skill of a surgeon I traced the nerves and blood vessels, in spite of their rubbery texture. I removed the liver, heart and kidneys and then cut off slices to examine under the microscope. By half-term the rat was no more than a head with a set of sharp teeth in a rictus grin. The expertise with which I’d dissected the rat and identified all its parts had initially impressed my biology teacher, but this didn’t last long.
When it came to following the rest of the A-level syllabus, I found myself making the same old mistakes. Once again I’d let Dad’s enthusiasm for my doing sciences get the better of me and, before leaving for Bedales, I’d accepted the loan of a collection of books that he claimed were essential for a budding doctor. Among these were several advanced and irrelevant books such as Gray’s Anatomy for medical students and two volumes that Dad insisted I read straight away. These were on animal behaviour and written by a Dutch scientist who’d spent his life studying sticklebacks having sex. I naively tried to use these books to prove to my teacher that I had the makings of a serious biologist, but soon found it had the opposite effect. On one occasion he set the class the task of researching and writing an essay on the life cycle of the earthworm, which was right there in the A-level syllabus. It should have been fairly straightforward, but I felt the need to impress and decided to write a detailed account of the courtship and mating habits of the stickleback instead, which I copied almost word for word from Dad’s books. Needless to say, I was asked to stay behind after class, w
here the teacher drew a red line across each page of my essay and then accused me of wasting both his time and mine. ‘I don’t know where you got this nonsense from,’ he said, staring down at the essay with his head in his hands, ‘but I think you’ll find the stickleback bears no resemblance to the earthworm.’
As with my O-levels, side-tracking into topics I didn’t understand and which weren’t part of the syllabus turned out to be the beginning of the end. I’d only just got away with it at Pimlico, but at Bedales it exasperated the teachers and led them to write in my first school report that I would do far better if I stopped talking in class and stayed focused – neither of which I seemed able to do. It had all started so well with the dissection of my rat and the idea that I only had to focus on the three sciences, which would set me on course to becoming a doctor and success in the eyes of my father. The trouble was, in biology I thought I knew it all, which I clearly didn’t, and in chemistry and physics I was rapidly coming to terms with the fact that I knew very little. In both of them I couldn’t do the maths, so it wasn’t long before I found I was either missing the point or struggling to keep up. With that, a sense of drowning started to take over again and that generally led to panic. Maybe if someone had taken me aside and explained in simple terms how to study properly I might have been able to get on and finally ignore Dad’s counterproductive suggestions, but no one ever did.
Gloucester Crescent Page 19